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With the help of an Alaska Native grandmother suffering from dementia, Chukchi police chief Nathan Active hunts down the killer who hid a woman’s expertly dismembered body in the ice cellar of an abandoned Inupiat fish camp. The investigation pulls Active into a dark tangle of love and jealousy, even as he struggles with the PTSD that has haunted him since being wounded in a shootout in an earlier case.

The Big Empty

"Active investigates a plane crash out in Alaska’s Big Empty—and what he finds there casts suspicion of murder on several locals in his small town of Chukchi. Evie Kavoonah, a young mother-to-be, and her fiancé, Dr. Todd Brenner, are on a flight over the Brooks Range when their bush plane runs out of gas and hits a ridge, instantly killing them both. Chukchi police chief Nathan Active doubts he’ll find anything amiss when his close friend, Cowboy Decker, asks him to look into the possibility of foul play. Evie was like a daughter to Cowboy, who trained her to fly, and he insists there’s no way his protégée made a fatal mistake that day. Nathan reluctantly plays along and discovers that Cowboy’s instincts are correct—the malfunction that led to the crash was carefully planned, and several people in the village have motives for targeting the pair. Meanwhile, Nathan’s wife, Gracie, is pregnant, but so scarred by memories of domestic abuse that she isn’t sure she should have the baby. Nathan must support her and their adopted daughter, Nita, while managing an increasingly complex and dangerous murder case." -- Publishers Weekly.

The Dana Forsythe Mysteries

The Sand Garden
Dana Forsythe Mystery No. 1

Dana Forsythe is a grieving widow and hard-nosed ex-policewoman who turns private eye after her cop husband Frank is killed on duty. She gets an even bigger shock when she learns Frank had twins with a secret mistress who's just been murdered. What's more, the orphaned twins are dropped off on Dana's patio in the middle of the night, then she's hired by an attorney to help defend the accused killer. The investigation plunges her deep into a world of wealth, privilege and murder in the glittering desert oasis of Palm Springs.

Read First Chapter
Hear Mary Wasche Read First Chapter
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Appearances

House of Mystery

Hear me discuss THE SAND GARDEN with Allen Warren, host of the NBC radio program "House of Mystery"

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Works in Progress

SHERLOCK- the screenplay

Sherlock Holmes rescues a beautiful actress’s nephew from a secret London boy brothel while hiding an even bigger secret—he’s actually Eva Whittaker, a woman compelled by Victorian gender prejudices to pass as a man in order to follow her dream and become the world’s greatest detective.

Read opening scene - Read Reviews - Order online

The Spill: Personal Stories from the Exxon Valdez Disaster

Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, sixty-two men and women shared personal stories of what they saw, how they reacted, and how they coped with North America s worst tanker oil spill. The stories tell of a shockingly slow response, the struggle to save the stricken tanker, the often heroic but largely futile efforts to limit the spread of oil and clean the beaches, a heart-breaking loss of fish and wildlife, a crippling blow to the commercial fishing industry, lingering social problems, and a loss of innocence among Alaskans who believed this spill would never happen. Reliving their experiences are fishermen, Native villagers, biologists, environmentalists, sociologists, Exxon executives, the governor, mayors, journalists, workers who washed oily rocks even the skipper of the ill-fated ship. For many of them, as one sociologist put it, the only way the Exxon Valdez disaster will end is when they die. "The Spill" is a cautionary tale about the high cost of complacency and neglect, and fair warning of the perils of putting off disaster planning for another day.

About Nathan Active

Biographies of me and my co-writers

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Contacts

"Active investigates a hit-and-run snowmobile homicide. He must also fight off the advances of Alaska’s gorgeous man-eating governor, Helen Mercer, who’s making a publicity-driven visit to her Chukchi home while contemplating a run for the White House. Jones uses his intimate knowledge of the state, his fondness for the Inupiat people and their traditions, and his eye for politicians’ excruciatingly funny incongruities to produce a well-rounded and appealing portrait of America’s Last Frontier." — Publishers Weekly

"Jones delivers a finely laddered plot — involving deadly arson at a local recreation center and a faceless body discovered at a remote campsite — but the real fun, as always, lies in the dozens of mini-lessons he gives on hardscrabble Alaskan life, covering everything from the illegal trade in polar-bear bladders to the description of a potent indigenous chewing tobacco made from burnt birch-tree fungus." — Tina Jordan Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

Hear Stan's interview with Jeff Brown on Juneau public radio station KTOO.

"Jones doesn’t pretend to find anything remotely character-building in the conditions of those who have survived the unforgiving climate of the Arctic only to disappear on the streets." — Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

"Active maintains his awe of the vast Alaskan tundra, a forbidding region that Jones renders in all its bone-chilling beauty." — Marilyn Stasio, New York Times.

White Sky, Black Ice
Nathan Active series, No. 1    

"You can feel the bite of the west wind that comes screaming across the Alaska tundra and sense the isolation of the Inupiat Eskimos who live in this desolate part of the far north." — Marilyn Stasio, New York Times.